Quite some time ago, I saw a very small video camera at a Hong Kong trade exhibition. It was the MD80 from the AEE company. Unfortunately its casing was made of metal which I thought would not be suitable to use while metal detecting.

Now there's a similar model with plastic casing available. It's not the original by AEE (*cough* knock-off), but is much cheaper and records clear video and audio. I paid approx USD26 inclusive of courier delivery and it came with a plethora of accessories (see photo below). The device did not come with any memory, so I bought a Kingston 4Gb micro SDHC card and slapped it in.

I intend to use the stick-on Velcro patches, swivel base and clip-on cage to affix it to my bungee harness. Voila! Hands-free video recording; no more running back and forth between camcorder and detector. Mind you, the video quality cannot match a regular handycam's but seems sufficient for my purposes.

This tiny thing does not have a viewfinder, so I have to guesstimate what's in it's field of view while recording. So far, it's been a hit or miss affair with chopped-off heads and wrong angles, but should improve with practice.

The battery life is claimed to be 2 hours, and it needs 1Gb of memory per 40 minutes of recording. Minimum distance between subject and lens is 5cm.

Well Salvor6, the only thing that resembles a brand name on the box is "MINI DV" Since you're in the USA, I ran a search on ebay for that...saw one for USD12.39 plus shipping which seems similar to mine, except it doesn't come with stick-on Velcro pads. It's cheaper than what I paid.

Ther is a company called iKam that makes a video camera in a pair of sunglasses. The quality of the video is really very good. Midland Radio company has just come out with a real small camera that comes with all kinds of ways to mount it to things, one is a clip that attaches to a brim of a hat. I think it's called the Midland XTC.

I have also bought a camera pretty similar to yours / same as yours : I tried all sorts of things to get the camera pointing in the right direction. Basically I wanted the camera to be able to look straight ahead at whatever I was looking at, but also to look down at me detecting and digging my finds. This was not an easy one to sort out, but finally I hit the nail on the head, and the following photos shows you my results.

I have taken a couple of videos now and am very happy with the results...... You can check out my videos as follows:

I enjoyed watching your videos. Such huge lovely expanses of flat land for you to detect on...we don't have much friendly terrain over here! Your idea of modding glasses to mount the camera on is very good indeed.

I've found an alternative solution as well: a small helmet cam that does HD videos. Among its accessories is a harness which is worn on the head, and the camera can be angled downwards. Check out

I did try a cap with the camera attached but was not successful because every time you take the cap off and put it back on it does not sit exactly the same again. The glasses I liked because it has a nose and ear point of contact to put the camera in exactly the same place.The stabilization can be a problem, but some software that you use for editing can remove a certain amount.... and removes wind sound quite a lot.

We are lucky to have large expanses of ground, but lots of the land has never had anyone on it, so there are not finds.... I walked 1 field and got no signals at all... I thought the detector had broken down

I am not sure where the microphone is located on your camera, but placing a piece of foam in front of it could reduce the wind effects on the recording. Most professionals recording outdoors have some fluffy material surrounding their microphones.

n_f, I did place a sponge around the camera / microphone which was very porous but this just baffled the sound too much, but still got the wind.... I need to look into something else to solve this problem

We are very blessed with the open spaces, but they are mostly spaces where nobody has been,,,, no people, no treasure